Monthly Archives: April 2010

First month of beta site webstats

The Scheme’s website has been running in β for just over  a month now has experienced no down time in that period. Attached to this post, is an analytics report for the period 24th March – 24th April and is provided just for reference. The stats aren’t that impressive yet in terms of critical mass for visitors (we’ve not publicised the new features yet as we’re catching all glitches); but there’s two figures which are quite good – visit length at 12 minutes 41 seconds and pages per visit at 16. The Scheme’s content is possibly classed as niche interest as well, but very academic and lay research driven, so we probably won’t ever get huge visitor figures.

Shortly, the Google analytics analysis module will go online and you will be able to get our stats at any time for our content, If you want to quote these anywhere, please feel free to do so.

Mapping added to user profiles for recorded finds

To follow on from the linking of user accounts to finds recorded, I’ve now added a simple link to a Google map of the findspots of these artefacts. It is gives full precision find spots and is only visible at this level to  your user account. No one else can get access to a map at this level of your finds. If there is a demand, I will also enable a context switched download of personal finds lists to Excel formats and KML for importing into Google Earth.

To access your finds map, you must firstly get your personal details that we hold for you linked to your account; so remember to ask your friendly FLO or Central Unit to hook you up. Then look for the below link above your finds lister:

Records map link

Where to find your personal map link

The dots on the map are colour coded – quarantine (black), on review (red), awaiting validation (yellow) and published (green). You cannot view red or black finds directly on the database, but you can at least see that they are recorded. The map below shows some dummy finds at a high zoom level. If your browser can support the Google Earth plugin for Google maps, you can also view the objects within the Scheme’s database window in that format (and on an OpenStreetMap layer.)

Dummy finds map

A dummy set of finds locations

What is coming next on the new website

The Scheme’s new website has been running in public β format now for just over a week; in that time we’ve been adding lots more data to the database. Our staff have managed to add 1000 new records in the last week, many of these with images. You may wonder why you can’t see all of these as a public user, and this is all down to our workflow model. The following simple methodology is employed to provide access to records:

  1. Quarantine – visible to: creator of record, Finds Advisers, Admin
  2. Review – visible to creator of record, Finds Liaison Officers, Finds Advisers, Admin
  3. Validation – visible to all registered users
  4. Publication  - visible to all registered users and has been checked for accuracy by Finds Advisers.

However, after the initial release, there is a lot more sitting around waiting for phased deployment to the new site. These deployments include:

  1. REST applications programming interface or api
  2. RDFa throughout view templates (we currently have FOAF embedded on contacts pages as a test; I may have done it wrong, if so tell me!)
  3. Historic Enviroment transfer spreadsheet (will be out next week)
  4. More context switched data views and switching on of geoRss feeds now that we’ve been stable for a week.
  5. More text extraction across the site. We already use OpenCalais to tie records together on our database, but it will be employed across the data that we ingest from the Guardian, TheyWorkForYou and dbpedia
  6. More geo enrichment from Yahoo! and geonames services. We already use Yahoo’s geoplanet to enrich findspots without National Grid references, and to obtain elevation and various other data on our records. We’ll be using it to give spatial context to our news and events. I’ll explain more about how we used these services elsewhere.
  7. Publication of the Staffordshire Hoard artefact records (produced by Kevin Leahy) and images taken by our efficient Treasure team.
  8. A new module for tracking the progress of Treasure cases through the system and a large amount of metadata attached
  9. A Google Analytics module that will leverage data obtained via their api and redisplay it openly on our site. I’ve been developing analysis of top content etc.
  10. Expansion of the data that we’ve reused from TheyWorkForYou – specifically to find objects found within parliamentary constituencies. The Scheme is good at lobbying, cf. the Early Day Motion campaign of 2008!
  11. More personalisation of interfaces
  12. Fix all issues raised by our staff and all those users that have kindly submitted comments
  13. Expansion of comments across more areas of our site – the short trial seems to be proving to work very well. We’re changing and updating finds records thanks to the comments and error reports that our users have submitted.
  14. Use geolocation to provide you with objects found within a predefined radius of your current location.

There’s probably more to come, but as we’re very AGILE, we’ll come to that later!

New Centre for Audio-Visual Study and Practice in Archaeology

The Institute of Archaeology has recently agreed to host the new Centre for Audio-Visual Study and Practice in Archaeology (CASPAR). Archaeology has a long record of being a subject for television and radio, and is now making excellent use of the newer digital technologies. Sometimes the relationship between archaeology and audio-visual media has been controversial, yet there is no doubt that archaeology has benefited from widespread public exposure over the last 50 years, and that new technologies are allowing are allowing us to rethink how people engage with archaeology.

The aim of the Centre is to:

  1. advocate the greater use of audio-visual media within archaeology;
  2. be an active voice for greater use and understanding of archaeological practises and themes within broadcasting and ICT;
  3. enable inventive and creative use of audio-visual media by archaeologists;
  4. promote research into the relationship between audio-visual media and archaeology.

The Centre will pursue its aims through organising conferences and workshops; publishing books and articles; organising film festivals and showings; compiling and maintaining a database of archaeology films, TV and radio programmes and websites; helping to provide input into relevant university courses; helping to run research seminars at the Institute of Archaeology; and carrying out research into its area of study.

You are welcome to attend the launch and reception to mark the inauguration of the new Centre at 2.00 pm on the 23rd April 2010.

The programme for the afternoon is:

2:00 Steve Shennan, Director of the Institute of Archaeology, Introduction and welcome

2:30 Julian Richards, broadcaster, Archaeology on TV and radio

3:00 Dan Pett, British Museum, Archaeology on the Internet

3:45 Andy Gardner, Institute of Archaeology, Archaeology and gaming

4:15 Angela Piccini, Bristol University, Research into archaeology and
media

4:45 Don Henson, Hon. Director CASPAR, The potential and remit of the
Centre

5:00 Wine reception

If you would like to come along, please contact Don Henson at the Council for British Archaeology